Commentary: Truth blown away in sugarcoated 'Gone With the Wind'

sacbee ^ | 11-13-04

[LouAvul]

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Based on Margaret Mitchell's hugely popular novel, producer David O. Selznick's four-hour epic tale of the American South during slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction is the all-time box-office champion.

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Considering its financial success and critical acclaim, "Gone With the Wind" may be the most famous movie ever made.

It's also a lie.

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Along with D.W. Griffith's technically innovative but ethically reprehensible "The Birth of a Nation" (from 1915), which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic, "GWTW" presents a picture of the pre-Civil War South in which slavery is a noble institution and slaves are content with their status.

Furthermore, it puts forth an image of Reconstruction as one in which freed blacks, the occupying Union army, Southern "scalawags" and Northern "carpetbaggers" inflict great harm on the defeated South, which is saved - along with the honor of Southern womanhood - by the bravery of KKK-like vigilantes.

To his credit, Selznick did eliminate some of the most egregious racism in Mitchell's novel, including the frequent use of the N-word, and downplayed the role of the KKK, compared with "Birth of a Nation," by showing no hooded vigilantes.

......snip.........

One can say that "GWTW" was a product of its times, when racial segregation was still the law of the South and a common practice in the North, and shouldn't be judged by today's political and moral standards. And it's true that most historical scholarship prior to the 1950s, like the movie, also portrayed slavery as a relatively benign institution and Reconstruction as unequivocally evil.

.....snip.........

Or as William L. Patterson of the Chicago Defender succinctly wrote: "('Gone With the Wind' is a) weapon of terror against black America."

[Colt .45]

No problem, I call 'em like I see 'em. And I see this lot as the supposed moral highground grabbers who would sell their own mothers out to achieve their "righteousness". I don't hold with slavery, but I do feel that the Southern States had the right to decide their own domestic issues for themselves without Washington DC's or Yankee interference. They think that when the 13 States ratified the Constitution that it just became the country called America. NOT SO! The individual States still retained sovereignty, and could withdraw from the Union if the People chose to do so under the 9th and 10th Amendments. Hence the "United States" because they banded together only to render limited power to the Federal Government. Federal means shared.

They are the PC types who will eventually try to rewrite Western Civilization history all in their purported Moral Version. What a LOAD OF CRAP!

[nolu chan]

Count ONE LIBERAL DISSENT to Ann Coulter by justshutupandtakeit.

The few, the loud, the Brigade.

[capitan_refugio]

As much as I enjoy Coulter's commentary, I had to chuckle when she listed Douglas MacArthur as a "son of the South." Douglas MacArthur was the son of Arthur MacArthur, Jr., a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor (Missionary Ridge, 24th Wisconsin, 1863) for his heroic service in the Union Army, a full colonel by the age of 19 (1864), and posted to Arkansas when his son Douglas was born.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that his mother, "Pinky" Hardy, was a Virginian, who was disowned by her two of her brothers (both VMI graduates who served with Lee) when she married the Yankee officer.

[Experiment 6-2-6]

There are YANKEES in ATLANTA!

[justshutupandtakeit]

I have no idea what you are referring to since I never said anything about Ann Coulter.

[nolu chan]

[jsuati #204] This was totally different than the degraded condition Southern slaves were kept in partially through laws which made teaching them to read a crime.

[jsuati #244] What a typical defense of the slavers tyranny by pointing to injustices elsewhere. At present, unfortunately for your defensive tack, we are talking about the South so that defense is inrrelevent. An aberration in the North in no way justifies a standard practice in the South and those laws were changed in the former as time went on.

Gee, and I thought you would see that it sounded just like a subsequently famous Supreme Court decision.

Your assertion was that other conditions were totally different from the South citing that laws in the South made teaching Blacks to read a crime. You compared the South to conditions elsewhere. As such was your argument, you opened the door to additional comparisons. Your whining about such comparisons will not stop them, but will only underscore that you can not meet them.

What a typical defense to declare that every non-Sourthern act was an "aberration."

Canterbury, CONNECTICUT; Canaan, NEW HAMPSHIRE; Zanesville, OHIO.

Here is another "abberation":

When John Randolph died in 1833, his slaves were emancipated by will and lands were purchased for them in Ohio. These freed Blacks were then driven from the farms provided for them by their former Southern owner.

SOURCE: Joanne Pope MELISH, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860, 1998, p. 190-92.

Explicit strategies to remove people of color physically from communi­ties, states, and nation were already well under way by 1800 and entered a new and more intense phase around 1820. One of the most effective means of achieving this end was the examination and "warning-out" of transients, an old practice aimed generally at eliminating impoverished and otherwise undesirable strangers who might become a public expense if allowed to remain in a given town. Strangers were defined as people who had not qualified for "legal settlement" in the town where they were living, by either birth; residence of indenture; ownership of real estate of a cer­tain value or the generating of rents or other income of a certain value; payment of taxes for five years within ten years' residence; or successful completion of one year of residence without having been warned out.43 Persons of color, along with unmarried mothers and elderly persons, had always been disproportionately represented among people examined as transients, but after 1780 the legal settlement requirement clearly began to be used explicitly to maintain control of local black communities. In one of the few quantitative studies of this issue, Ruth Wallis Herndon has shown that in Rhode Island, though only 5 percent of transients were designated as people of color in the 1750s, that number had grown to 22 percent in the 1790s and 50 percent by 1800. She points out that the increase was due to greater precision in recordkeeping and a greater representation of peo­ple of color in the transient population -- both consequences of a height­ened attention to "race."

Transient examinations provided the legal ammunition to achieve what abolition could not -- removal -- and were an effective means of reducing the numbers of people of color residing in a given New England town. Charges of "disorderly behavior" were also grounds for warning out and hence instruments of potential removal wielded by town councils. The ever more frequent appearance of people of color "with no legal settlement," "likely to become chargeable," and "behaving riotously" reinforced the growing public conception of them as a naturally dependent and disor­derly group of permanently estranged aliens, leading in turn to further ex­aminations and warnings-out.

The records of the Town Council of Providence, Rhode Island, provide a particularly rich source of information on one town's campaign for removal. After 1785 the council frequenuy conducted what can only be termed peri­odic roundups of people of color who were "likely to become chargeable" and who, if found to lack a legal setdement, could be warned out of Provi­dence. Akhough whites too were examined, whole meetings would fre­quenuy be devoted to the examination of people clearly identified as persons of color. The records reveal that dieir construction as "strangers" was true only in the sense of whites' estrangement from any comprehension of their reality. Of sixty-five examinations between 1782 and 1800 of people who can clearly be identified as persons of color and whose lengdi of residence in Providence is clearly discernible, 37 percent had lived in Providence for five years or more, and 26 percent for ten years or more (interim warnings-out not having been enforced, presumably). Median length of stay in die city was three years. These people were not strangers.

Nor were they "likely to become chargeable"; even diose who did hard­ly represented a disproportionate drain on die public treasury. In die ear­ly 1820s, at one peak of antiblack sentiment in Providence, die reports of die Overseer of die Poor demonstrate that people of color received an ex­tremely small proportion of die town's financial support for die indigent. In 1823 and 1824, for example, 16 of 154 cases and 9 of 157 cases, re­spectively, involved persons of color. The average amount of support re­ceived by whites was $33.33 in 1823 and $44.84 in 1824; by people of color, $11.24 and $11.93, respectively.46 Again, die menace was imagined.

After 1820, efforts to remove residents of color were augmented by strategies to discourage the immigration of new ones, and anti-immigration statutes were debated in nearly every state.

Ward Hill Lamon, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 206

Illinois enacted a "black code" that would have been a disgrace to a Slave State, and was simply an infamy in a free one. It borrowed the provisions of the most revolting laws known among men, for exiling, selling, beating, bedevilling, and torturing negroes, whether bond or free.

In 1848, Illinois adopted a new constitution. Article 14 of the new constitution read:

The General Assembly shall at its first session under the amended constitution pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free person of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state, for the purpose of setting them free.

In February 1853, the Illinois legislature made it a crime for a Black to settle in Illinois. If he could not pay the fine, the was then subject to sale by the sheriff for a term of service.

In his July 6, 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay, Lincoln referred to the Declaration of Independence as "the white man's charter of freedom."

"an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white-man's charter of freedom -- the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal'"

On October 16, 1854, Lincoln again referred to the Declaration of Independence as the "the white man's charter of freedom."

In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we "cancel and tear to pieces'' even the white man's charter of freedom.

The U.S. Supreme Court made "separate but [inherently un]equal", i.e. segregation, the law of the land in 1896. See Plessy v. Ferguson.

CIVIL RIGHTS CASES, 109 U.S. 3 (1883) struck down (8-1) Federal laws which prohibited discrimination on account of race.

There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty, and property the same as white citizens; yet no one, at that time, thought that it was any invasion of their personal status as freemen because they were not admitted to all the privileges enjoyed by white citizens, or because they were subjected to discriminations in the enjoyment of accommodations in inns, public conveyances, and places of amusement. Mere discriminations on account of race or color were not regarded as badges of slavery. If, since that time, the enjoyment of equal rights in all these respects has become established by constitutional enactment, it is not by force of the thirteenth amendment, (which merely abolishes slavery,) but by force of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

On the whole, we are of opinion that no countenance of authority for the passage of the law in question can be found in either the thirteenth or fourteenth amendment of the constitution; and no other ground of authority for its passage being suggested, it must necessarily be declared void, at least so far as its operation in the several states is concerned.

Justice Harlan, alone in his dissent, wrote:

The supreme law of the land has decreed that no authority shall be exercised in this country upon the basis of discrimination, in respect of civil rights, against freemen and citizens because of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. To that decree -- for the due enforcement of which, by appropriate legislation, congress has been invested with express power -- every one must bow, whatever may have been, or whatever now are, his individual views as to the wisdom or policy, either of the recent changes in the fundamental law, or of the legislation which has been enacted to give them effect.

For the reasons stated I feel constrained to withhold my assent to the opinion of the court.

The individual cases which SCOTUS combined for consideration under the "Civil Rights Cases" arose from Kansas, California, Missouri, New York, and Tennessee.

[jsuati] those laws were changed in the former as time went on

New York, 1863, strange fruit hanging from a tree.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Well being born at a military base in Arkansas is sufficient for those trying to justify the attempt to destroy the Union.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Nice try but those incidents do not change the FACT that without the Slave Patrols slaves would have fled to the North in the thousands to escape the tyranny of the Slavers.
They understood where they would have a better chance at life.

I certainly don't claim the North was perfect for ex-slaves but compared to the Tyranny of the Whip and Lash it was vastly better. Why all the trouble about runaways and the Fugitive slave laws if there was no difference? Why did the Blacks flee to the North if given half a chance?

You can pretend all you want but all your pretending does not change the fact that Abolitionists were a strong and growing force feared by the South. They were not nearly as racist as their fellow Yankees and chances are most of the most severe racists actions such as the Draft Riots you illustrated were perpetrated by new immigrants not Yankees.

[lentulusgracchus]

Of all your insane ravings the last portion of this post takes the cake..... <snipping blah blah blah....>

He denied that Southerners had Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights in slaves. My point is pretty straightforward: deny people their rights and you deny them their citizenship and their humanity.

What part of that is hard for you to understand, babbler? I'll try to help.

Our friend pecked and sniffed at Southerners' rights. Said they didn't have any. Copped a moralizing stance when he did it. Wake up and smell the coffee, I drew a perfectly logical inference. He denied Southerners their rights out of despite (despite is what you do, when you despise someone -- that's a hint, OK, laughing boy?). Because he doesn't like them, he does the same thing Roger Taney described the law doing with respect to the rights of slaves: they are slaves and property, and therefore they have no rights that a white man need respect. That's called abrogating rights. By abrogating Southerners' property rights in their slaves, our interlocutor denied that these Southerners were citizens, and made them rightless persons. He equated them with slaves.

How do you dissever one right from others, and say to a person "well, you may have First Amendment rights, but I'll uphold no rights -- recognize no rights, enforce no rights, give you no relief whatever -- that you may claim under the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh Amendments," without making that person rightless, and less than a citizen? Because if you can say that to a person and make it stick, then you needn't recognize or uphold his First Amendment rights either, because you enjoy despotic power over that person.

That's what our friend just claimed -- the right to tell other people what rights they have, based on where they come from, and who they are. That's despotic, and it's sectional prejudice.

Now do you get it?

[lentulusgracchus]

[You, quoting me] "Now when are you going to quit posting McPherson's Marxian "vanguard liberation" slurs?"

[You, sidestepping and being coy] Such as? I'm not familiar with the term.

Marxists talk about vanguard-led revolution and wars of liberation as a validator of vanguard (Marxist) leadership. Liberation of the masses washes clean and exalts violence against the bourgeoisie and other oppressor classes, and it validates the despotic power of the visionary leadership and its right to lead policy. McPherson's writing applies that conceptual framework to the Civil War and American society.

You haven't heard of "wars of liberation"? Of vanguardism?

[capitan_refugio]

Nope.

[capitan_refugio]

"Causes of the Civil War" looked like an interesting thread. I never posted to it.

[nolu chan]

[cr #258] By the 1860 territorial census, there were 29 slaves in Utah.

[cr #258] Similarly, in 1860, the were 22 slaves listed in the New Mexico territorial census.

My copy of the 1860 Census Report shows:

• 29 slaves in Utah
• 0 in New Mexico. (New Mexico shows a free colored population of 85.)
• 15 in Nebraska.
• 3,185 in Washington, D.C.

Total Territory slave population is listed as 3,229, including Washington, D.C.

Excluding Washington, D.C., the total slave population of the territories was 44.

Excluding Washington, D.C., the total free black population of the territories was 303. (CO 46; NE 67; NV 45; NM 85; UT 30; WA 30)

A stubborn fact remains. The slave population in the territories was insignificant.

Fighting a war over the right to import slave labor into the territories would have been like fighting a war over who could have exclusive rights to import snowballs into Alaska.

Slavery was ended in Northern states because they were less economical than free labor. There was no economic advantages in the territories for slave labor. In some areas (near Mexico) available cheap labor made negro slavery uneconomical. Labor-intensive King cotton was what made negro slavery economical in the South. King cotton was not moving into the territories.

Slavery had died, or was in the process of dying, in the U.S. and elsewhere. As Joan Pope Melish observed, “to whites, regardless of their personal relationship to slavery, ‘freedom’ meant the absence of slaves. But because it was easy to conflate the elimination of slaves as a category with the elimination of the humans occupying that category, the propsect of an end to slavery undoubtedly had meant to many whites the end of a troubling black presence.”

“Gradual abolition” in the North tended not toward abolition but toward “ethnic cleansing” by moving the black population South. The South did not desire 4 million free Black neighbors (although there were more free Blacks in the South than in the North). Abolition in the South raised an apparent need to have someplace to send the undesired population elsewhere, just as the North had done. The territories were the obvious choice, not for cotton plantations, but for use as a dumping ground for an unwanted population.

[capitan_refugio]

"You want Southerners for your Negroes, to be your workhorses, your whipping boys, and your all-purpose bottle-washers in your imperial society. You deny they had rights. You assert a "moral imperative" of a "higher law" precisely as Lincoln did -- to serve yourself. So who's the slaver now?"

You are in serious need of a strong cathartic.

The founding principles are, essentially, moral in character. The south chose to continue to practice the theology of oppression. Lincoln was willing to tolerate slavery where it was. He felt that dissolution of the Union or war were greater evils than the continuation - at least temporarily - of slavery.

I always find it interesting that those who glorify the slave-holding republic yammer on about how southern "rights" were being violated and how their "liberty" was being infringed. Yet, they hardly ever comment about how the natural law rights and liberty of those they enslaved account for nothing, and of the wholesale denial of fundamental constitutional rights (such as freedom of political speech, free association, etc) to those who opposed their reign of terror.

[capitan_refugio]

"A stubborn fact remains. The slave population in the territories was insignificant."

I agree, it was statistically insignificant. However, I pointed out the "foot-in-the-door" argument; which was being advocated at that time by some in the south.

[lentulusgracchus]

Racism was a stain on the nation NORTH and SOUTH and don't try and tell me that I claim otherwise......I am in no way playing "spot" or "blemish" .

Oh, yeah? Well, how are we supposed to tell that you are NOT doing that, from posts like this one?

This was totally different than the degraded condition Southern slaves were kept in partially through laws which made teaching them to read a crime. Does this mean there weren't gulag-like conditions in the mines? No, of course not but it also did not prevent you from trying to exculpate the Slavers from their guilt.
204 posted on 11/16/2004 9:51:55 AM CST by justshutupandtakeit

Well, what that hell was that, boyo? You were absolutely so playing "Spot"! The hell you weren't! Liar!!

Oh, and then, to make your display of fatuity complete, you posted

Besides you wouldn't recognize ignorance if it bit you in the ass.

Whereupon nolu chan promptly demonstrated the ignorance of your own statement inculpating the South:

This was totally different than the degraded condition Southern slaves were kept in partially through laws which made teaching them to read a crime.

Which nolu chan promptly showed you, and everyone, that laws forbidding persons of color access to learning were not a hallmark of Southern chattel slavery, but of general racism. For if forbidding learning to black slaves was a feature just of slavery (the French had such laws in Haiti, and so it wasn't just the English-speaking world, either), then such laws wouldn't have been passed to attach to free blacks in New England. Nolu chan shows us, then, that reneging education to blacks was actually racism, not slaving, and that it was practiced everywhere.

Therefore your attempt to distinguish American chattel slavery from ancient slavery, and to attach a special odium to the former, falls to the ground, and your splenetic sectionalist attack against the South falls with it.

Like I said, he pantsed you.

[lentulusgracchus]

Sounded like something one would hear from Jeanine Garafolo or other Anti-Americans.

Oh, yeah? Well, answer my last, and then snigger some more about Garrulous Garofalo -- after you've explained away (or tried to : lots of luck) your storefront-window display of fecklessness in argument and baldfaced attempts to lie about your nasty little sectionalist attack.

[lentulusgracchus]

In order to exaggerate wildly any incorrectness in my comment you must ignore much of it and selectively misquote from the rest. Typical.

While you're climbing down from the rest of that dungpile you've heaped up, you can take back this stupid statement, too.

[lentulusgracchus]

[stand watie to justshutupandtakeit] please POST your academic credentials, as you seem to believe that yours are "so superior" to that of the other people's here.

He can't. The only credential he can claim is the one nolu chan posted for him: he's wrong, and silly.

And a mean little ankle-biter, too.....if you stopped to notice.